What do Teachers Think about Testing Procedure at Schools?

Abstract

Testing is one of the important factors in foreign language teaching and learning process. Teachers use tests for different purposes such as evaluating their students⿿ progress, diagnosing their weaknesses and strengths and helping them improve in foreign language, checking the efficiency of their teaching and determining their achievement level. In the educational system in Turkey, national exams including questions for foreign language take place and according to the school grades and the results of these exams students are guided to different schools. Therefore, the main purpose of the students and their parents is to get higher grades in the foreign language exams. This is a qualitative research that aims at learning the reflections of the teachers for the testing system at schools. 20 teachers from different state secondary schools joined the survey and they were given a structured open-ended questionnaire containing 8 questions about testing at state schools. With their answers the situation was analyzed from the perspective of the teachers. They generally agree that they pay attention to reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary in the exams they prepare although they believe that this type of exams fail to measure the real performance of the students. They also complain that the expectations of parents for higher grades in the exams have a negative effect on the foreign language learning and teaching process. As a result of the study, some suggestions were made to improve the foreign language teaching and testing system.